Shark Week, Day 2

We had a lot of crap to do today. Doctors appointments, school clothes shopping (can kids PLEASE stop outgrowing shoes overnight??), and I worked in the evening. But, it didn't stop us from doing a quick little bit of Shark Week. 

Today's experiment was super quick and didn't work as planned. The idea is to fill one balloon with water, and one with oil. You drop them in a pail of water to see which sinks or floats. This teaches that most sharks float (because their skeletons are made of cartilage, not bone), but some sharks like nurse sharks actually sink to the bottom. 

Unfortunately, I think I got too much air in each balloon, because both ended up floating, albeit one was trying to sink. But, the kids got the idea, and we followed it up with a simple weight comparison to really feel the difference between bone and cartilage. But since I don't happen to have skeletons in my closet and cartilage in the cupboards, I used a heavy metal spatula to represent a bone, and a straw to represent cartilage. 

After that quicky experiment, we went right to the art project. This was another Pinterest winner that was stupid simple. The kids used glue sticks to put down various shades of blue tissue paper to make a stained glass type ocean, and then add silhouettes of sharks (that I cut out because both boys were getting frustrated at cutting their own). 

Cam chose great whites again, and Calen added a "dead fish" to the middle of his hammerheads. 

The end. Super fun and simple, but it was time consuming so it engaged them for a while. 

Today's snack was superbly awesome, in a torture your kids type of way awesome. I chose an accurate taste of what sharks like to eat: sardines. 

Okay so maybe sharks don't pop open cans of sardines and snack on them. Neither do most Americans. But it was fun I couldn't wait for their reactions. 

For extra effect, I made a shark mouth out of Bugles. Because of course I did. 

I managed to catch the moment that perfectly depicts how the boys liked the sardines. Calen is licking his lips because he liked it, Camden is angry that I made him try it. 

Brilliance. 

Calen even ended up making "stuffed crab shells", in which he stuffed sardines inside the Bugles. He convinced me to try one, and it's strangely delicious. 

And that was really the end of it for the day. We found a few more shark documentaries on Amazon Prime and they played Lego submarines and sharks basically all day. 

 

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